Rohingya crisis: Myanmar says UN move can harm talks with Bangladesh

More boats carrying Rohingyas reach Bangladesh

Myanmar on Wednesday, November 8, 2017, says that the UN Security Council's statement on the Rohingya refugee crisis could “seriously harm” its talks with Bangladesh over repatriating more than 600,000 people who have fled there to escape a Myanmar military crackdown. In this Reuters photo taken yesterday, a Rohingya refugee walks uphill carrying a vessel filled with water at Palongkhali refugee camp, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

Myanmar said on Wednesday that the UN Security Council's statement on the Rohingya refugee crisis could “seriously harm” its talks with Bangladesh over repatriating more than 600,000 people who have fled there to escape a Myanmar military crackdown.

The Security Council had urged Myanmar, in a statement on Monday, to “ensure no further excessive use of military force” and had expressed “grave concern over reports of human rights violations and abuses in Rakhine State”.

Responding, Myanmar's de facto leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, whose less than two year-old civilian administration shares power with the military, said the issues facing Myanmar and Bangladesh could only be resolved bilaterally, a point she says was ignored in the Security Council statement.

“Furthermore, the (Security Council) Presidential Statement could potentially and seriously harm the bilateral negotiations between the two countries which have been proceeding smoothly and expeditiously,” Suu Kyi's office said in a statement.

Negotiations with Bangladesh were ongoing it said, and the Bangladesh Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali had been invited to Myanmar from November 16-17.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is due to visit Myanmar a day earlier, on November 15, with moves afoot in Washington to bring a bill calling for sanctions on Myanmar that specifically target the military and related business interests.

In a nod to China, the Myanmar statement said it appreciated the stand taken by some members of the Security Council who upheld the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries.

To appease council veto powers Russia and China, Britain and France dropped a push for the Security Council to adopt a resolution on the situation and the 15-member body instead unanimously agreed on a formal statement.

More boats reach Bangladesh

The United Nations has denounced the violence during the past 10 weeks as a classic example of ethnic cleansing to drive the Rohingya Muslims out of Buddhist majority Myanmar.

Rejecting that accusation, the military says its counter-insurgency clearance operation was provoked by Rohingya militants' synchronised attacks on 30 security posts in the northern part of Rakhine State on August 25.

Rohingya refugees say the military torched their villages, but the military say the arsonists were Rohingya militants. The refugees' have given harrowing accounts of rape and murder. Myanmar says those accusations will have to be investigated.

Meantime, the exodus from Rakhine continues. Several thousand Rohingya reached Bangladesh last week, many of them wading through shallows on the Naf river on the boundary between the two countries, and some making a short, but perilous sea crossing in small boats.

On Tuesday, Bangladesh border guards told Reuters of at least two more boats reaching Cox's Bazar, bringing 68 more Rohingya to join the hundreds of thousands who have taken shelter in refugee camps there.

Suu Kyi, a stateswoman lionised as a Nobel Peace Prize winner for defying the junta that ruled Myanmar for decades, has been pilloried abroad for not speaking out more forcefully to rein in the military.

Last week she went to Rakhine for the first time since the crisis erupted, and met with community leaders and saw what efforts were being made to deliver aid and return the region to some semblance of normality.

While she has spoken of plans to open repatriation processing centres, where the refugees will have to prove they were once resident in Rakhine before being allowed to return.

Having been classed as stateless by the military junta that ruled Myanmar for decades, Rohingya could struggle passing the repatriation test.

During recent weeks, authorities began issuing "national verification cards" to people in northern Rakhine. Remaining Rohingya have been reluctant to accept these cards as they do not guarantee citizenship, and would effectively treat them as new immigrants